Raising A Question of the Privileges of the House

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCALISE. Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Oklahoma for yielding.

When we go back to January, as many people have, we knew that it was going to be a narrow majority. We also knew that it wasn't going to be easy. How many of us came here because we thought this job was going to be easy? How many of us thought the task ahead of us to address the problems of this country was going to be easy?

One thing we did know is that if we were going to finally start confronting problems that had been ignored for years and years and years, we had to change the way this place worked, and one thing Speaker McCarthy embraced from day one is to start making those kinds of changes to this institution, opening up the process, allowing Members to be more engaged, having amendments come to the floor, single-subject bills, doing appropriations bills.

Yes, making that happen overnight is not something that happens automatically, but it started to happen, and we are now seeing the fruits of it. Just last week, we had four different appropriations bills on this House floor, four different ones. Now, those bills took weeks and weeks to finally get to the floor, going through an open committee process, hundreds of amendments, each one of them where Republicans and Democrats could bring their ideas.

We debated those bills on the floor, some until after midnight where Members could actually participate in the process. This has been a broken process for a long time, but it is a process where we, if we are going to confront the problems that families are facing, we need to resolve our differences inside this House Chamber before we can then go and fight for those families who are struggling. Every single day across America families are struggling with real problems that we are going to have to get back to solving.

Those problems are real for them. It is inflation. It is the economy. It is high energy costs. It is an open southern border that doesn't just affect the border States. It is affecting every State--Republican districts, Democrat districts. Everybody knows it, and it can be ignored by the White House, but this House is the only body that started to take action with H.R. 2 and then with the border bill last week. Plus, with the action we took last week, over 70 percent of government funding passed out of the House, however everybody voted, Republican or Democrat.

This House passed funding for over 70 percent of the Federal Government's operation, and it is sitting over in the Senate where they passed zero, and we are going to beat each other up and talk about our internal processes and we need to get our internal processes working better, but so does that other body over there and so does the White House.

Everybody in this town needs to be engaged in addressing these problems, but if we don't start here and if we don't focus these next 45 days--because that is what we have got in front of us, we have got two bills this week, we have got two more appropriations bills next week, and if we are going to be confronting those, we have got to stay focused on our mission.

What the other side does, let's continue to put pressure on them, but we also need to put pressure on ourselves to do our job. Speaker McCarthy has been leading at the top of the level to make sure that we have the tools to do our jobs in a different way than the House has done it before.

This House is going to have to continue to make those changes, but the American people sent us here to confront those problems. We are finally starting to. This isn't the time to slow that process down. We need to keep doing our work. We need to keep fighting for those families who are struggling, but so does the Senate and so does the White House, as well.

Let's keep doing this work that we were sent here to do.

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